Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Experience)

• The Experience team is at the center of one of the most exciting transitions in software development history — the shift from human-driven to agent-driven product experiences
• We own Pinecone’s API, clients, authentication, revenue, and observability systems, and right now that means redesigning all of it for a world where AI agents are first-class users alongside humans
• This is a wide-scope role
• You’ll own things end-to-end — from backend architecture to API design to SDK and web surfaces
• You’ll be working closely with product, design, and other engineering teams to identify user needs and build the right thing, at the right abstraction level, at the right time
• Along the way, you will be building high-leverage platform capabilities that accelerate Pinecone’s product development and user growth systems
• Pioneer our agent experience. Shape how AI agents interact with Pinecone — designing interfaces, protocols (MCP), and tooling that make Pinecone the easiest and most capable platform for agentic workflows to build on
• Ship end-to-end experiences across API, SDK, CLI, and web. You’ll own the full surface, from the HTTP layer to the UI, and you’ll make calls across all of it
• Build systems that multiply team output. We care about what ships, not how many hours went into it. Design AI-powered workflows, automated quality gates, and high-leverage platform capabilities that let a small team move at a pace that would otherwise require 10x the headcount
• Set the standard for AI-assisted development on the team. Use the best tools available — Claude Code, Cursor, or whatever works — and help establish patterns that make the whole team faster
• Collaborate with product, design, and engineering to identify what users (and agents) actually need and build it at the right abstraction level, at the right time
• Build observable, auditable systems with monitoring, alerting, and verification mechanisms — because in a high-velocity environment, you need systems that tell you when something’s wrong

Benefits

• Health and Wellness: Medical, dental and vision plans, paid parental leave, and mental health resources offer holistic well-being coverage for you and your family.
• Compensation and Financial Benefits: Pinecone offers competitive base salary and equity compensation, opportunity to build a savings and investment portfolio, and resources to protect your family from the unexpected.
• Other Benefits: Pinecone is a hybrid in-office/remote workforce that offers Flexible PTO and WFH Equipment Stipend. Employees also enjoy attending our annual company retreat and occasional team offsites.- You’re not waiting to see how the industry figures out MCP, agentic workflows, and AI-native interfaces — you’re already experimenting, already forming opinions, already building
• We’re looking for an engineer who sees this moment for what it is: a rare opportunity to shape how developers and agents interact with a category-defining product
• You know that speed and leverage matter more than labor, and you’ve internalized AI-assisted development not as a productivity trick but as a fundamentally different way of working
• Senior and Staff Engineers at Pinecone operate with high autonomy. You’ll be an active partner in setting strategy on APIs, agent interfaces, observability, and developer experience — not just executing on a roadmap. We care more about how you think and how you work than whether your resume checks every box
• Proven ability to design and deliver versioned APIs, SDKs, or client libraries
• Hands-on experience shipping with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) as a genuine part of your workflow
• At least 4 years of software engineering experience
• A bias toward automation and leverage — you reach for systems and tooling before you reach for elbow grease
• Strong intuition for what makes APIs easy for both humans and agents to use correctly
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Proficiency building web interfaces with React or similar
• Experience building or consuming MCP servers, or designing APIs explicitly for agent use cases
• Familiarity with agentic frameworks and the emerging patterns around tool use, orchestration, and agent-to-agent communication
• Strong familiarity with a compiled language like Rust, Go, or Java
• Experience developing database or query engine SDKs
• Experience with large-scale open-source projects